Gary Holt Says Paul Baloff’s Wildest Stories Were Totally Made Up

Turns out, not everything Paul Baloff said was gospel — actually, a lot of it was complete bullshit. According to Exodus guitarist Gary Holt, the late frontman was basically the thrash metal equivalent of your friend who “swears” they once jammed with Cliff Burton in a Taco Bell parking lot.

While promoting his new memoir A Fabulous Disaster: From the Garage to Madison Square Garden, The Hard Way, Holt pulled back the curtain on some of Baloff’s more creative autobiographical details.

“We bought it up till his death,” Holt said, as transcribed by Ultimate Guitar. “Other people come up to me with their tales of Paul, and they tell me, ‘Oh, Paul told me this thing.’ And like, that’s such bullshit. That never happened.”

If you ever heard the tale of Baloff being born in Russia to rocket scientist parents who smuggled him and his sister out of the country on horseback… yeah, no.

“I have his death certificate. He was born in Highland Hospital in Oakland. He’d never been to Russia in his life, and his mother was Dutch. But he was half Russian. But he said his birth name was Pavel Nikolayevitch Balchishkov.”

According to Holt, the band just rolled with it — half for the laughs, half because it was easier than fact-checking Baloff in the middle of a tour.